Dear Jim
by SaltwaterGarden
Summary: Jim Moriarty has always been easily bored. But as he starts to understand the world, he finds that so much entertainment is possible. Boom.
1. Chapter 1

_The Inspector sits on the couch in Sussex and talks to Mrs. Powers about her son's death. _

"_He was…yes, visibly upset. Depressed, I guess you could say." Mrs. Powers picks at her hands and looks down at her knees, crossed over one another, before she grabs another tissue and brings it dramatically to her face. Carl Powers had been eleven when he was found floating in a swimming pool in London with no pulse. Any mother would be this upset, this nervous. The Inspector knows; he's read books on this. He knows. _

_Before he leaves the house, he asks to be shown around, because despite everything, despite the fact that this seems utterly like a run-of-the-mill unfortunate suicide, something is niggling in the back of his mind. The shoes. Because that damn Holmes kid is right, and the boy's damn shoes should have been with the boy's things in the locker room, and they weren't. The Inspector does not have a search warrant, but Mrs. Powers is fine with giving him a tour. _

_As they go upstairs, Mrs. Powers excuses herself for a moment, and walks down the hall into the bathroom. She looks terrible, eyes scrunched up as if she is willing herself not to cry. The Inspector waits until she is in the bathroom and then continues to the top of the stairs. Just off the hall is a door, upon which hangs a little sign covered with trucks and cars. A little boy's sign. The inspector leans across the hall and opens the door a little, peering into the room. He raises his eyebrows in surprise._

_The room is astonishingly tidy. The walls are unadorned, plain white. The bedspread is patterned with cars, but it lays absolutely flat on the sheets, military-style. There is a computer on the desk, surprising in such a young boy's room (this is 1989) , hooked up with cables to the wall. A television sits on an orderly bookshelf. The floor is wooden, and no toys litter it. The closet it partially open and a row of identical white button-down shirts can be seen. The whole effect is one of a temporary sleeping arrangement, a hotel room rather than a living space. It is utterly silent. The Inspector cannot see the shoes._

_As he pulls his head out of the boy's room, he sees Mrs. Powers standing at the bottom of the stairs, smiling up at him. She looks much calmer. _

"_That's not Carl's room," she says, lips curling up at the corners in an entirely unamused fashion. "That's my stepson's room. James. He's nine. He's away at school now."_

_The Inspector nods and apologizes. Mrs. Powers shows him down the hall, to Carl's room, which has nothing on the door but sticky grey marks where duct tape has been removed. The inside of Carl's room is covered in debris and smells strongly of socks. An aquarium in one corner balances precariously, filled with plants and fish, the filter rattling noisily. The bed is unmade, even though Carl's body was found nearly two weeks ago. Books and papers spill out of a book bag on the bed and litter a desk under the window. There are bowls of half-eaten food on the edge of the desk and peeking from beneath the bed, and old cups of cold tea on the windowsill. The contrast between the two boys' rooms, the Inspector thinks, would be amusing if the situation were not so morbid._

_And there are the sneakers. He has heard about these sneakers, these fancy trainers, from Carl's playmates who were interviewed following his death. They were the only shoes he ever wore. Mrs. Powers has not mentioned them, but here they are on the floor, looking new and shiny and as if they have just been removed from Carl's feet._

_There is no need to touch them, examine them, record them. That would be making too much fuss over the Holmes girl's blathering. The Inspector doesn't like to think that he's less intelligent than a little bureaucrat's daughter who hangs about crime scenes because her father's in the government. He thanks Mrs. Powers, and he leaves, collecting his bag on the way out. As he walks down the sidewalk outside the house to get to his car, he passes a little boy, about nine years old, with dark hair and dark eyes and a crisp white button-down shirt. _

_When it started, it was so easy that Jim was surprised. The police were supposed to be competent. Cop shows always ended with the criminals caught. Jim figured that the police would figure out it had been him, or at least, if they couldn't grasp that a nine-year-old had orchestrated the assassination of an eleven-year-old, trace the crime to his parents. It wasn't so hard to make the jump, was it? Boy with eczema, a proficient swimmer, no symptoms of depression, found floating in a pool dead of asphyxiation? Obvious conclusion: someone fiddled with the medicine. Who has access to that? Doctors and family. Jim had even given them a clue, hadn't he? No shoes on Carl. How could an eleven-year-old boy possibly have gotten to London from Sussex without shoes? Inference: someone stole them after he died. Jim had brought them home afterwards himself. Once the police found the shoes in his house, they'd know. Or that had been the idea._

_What Jim really wanted was for something exciting to happen. The world was so boring. His teachers were stupid, his parents were stupid. The news was dull. When he set out to have his stepmother kill Carl, he had imagined the end result to be the following: a nine-year-old boy, testifying as the defendant in a criminal court, convicted of murder. Exciting stuff, front-page stuff. Papers would be abuzz. Because surely he, little Jim Powers, could not outrun the sophisticated criminal justice system, not even if the crime was as clever as this. _

_Jim hated his stepmother. When she'd married his father, she had killed him. She had made Jim's pleasant but dull life into a madhouse. His father , Mr. Powers, was a professor. He was brilliant but lazy, and his new stepmother had encouraged that laziness with affection, telling Mr. Powers to forget this or that project and go out to dinner, go have a drink with the lads, allowing his father to sink into frequent bouts of alcoholism until inevitably the man wound up dead, floating in the water inside the twisted wreck of a car. His blood alcohol level had been thrice the legal limit. Meanwhile, his stepmother's anxiety, which had always been there, increased tenfold. Jim watched her after his father's death, watched her grow increasingly nervous. Carl, Jim's stupid stepbrother, didn't notice at all. Nor did he notice Jim playing on it. Jim acted as normal as possible around Carl. He was a good actor. When it was just him and his stepmother, though, he did things. Broke glasses, spoke in odd voices and threw his voice around the house. Messed with her. She was on the brink anyway. It allowed him to relieve some of the boredom of everyday life, and watching the woman who killed his father break down into madness, knowing he was partially responsible… well, that was downright fun. She started popping pills, and then when the symptoms started to show, when she started getting schizophrenic meltdowns, she was sent to doctors. The Powers became a family of pills. Pills for Carl's eczema, pills for his mother's mental disorders. And that was when Jim had gotten the idea. Jim was the one who replaced her fluphenazine pills with placebos the week before Carl died. A nervous wreck, that is what she was, and she was the one had mixed the clostridium botulinum with Carl's medication, trying to consolidate two half-empty, identical containers._

_Bam. Dead stepbrother, presto. Jim needed to do barely anything._

_As it turned out, though, the police were stupid. The case closed as a suicide, even though all of the facts were staring the damn investigators in the face. And when Jim heard that, an entirely new idea had popped into his head. He had gone into his room, and he had sat before his computer, the world of possibilities opening before him like an unfolding aurora of potential. Jim had switched the machine on and sat before it as it hummed to life. He had smiled._


	2. Chapter 2

It's the easiest thing in the world to set up a website, if you know code. Jim knows code. There are books for that sort of thing, and now the internet has made it easier than ever to look up information. Within the week he has an online presence. Nothing in particular is listed on his website- there's just his name, Jim, and what he does, and an email. He is after all only nine. No time yet to build up a resume.

If you want to contact me, the website says, please send an e-mail to the address below.

He places discreet notices in forums where teenagers and young adults- young, vulnerable people -like to chat. Under an assumed name, he begins exchanging mail with them. It's very easy to win their devotion-some implied connections to this or that organization, some reference to his plan to change the world, and they are hooked, fascinated. They're bored too, of course, looking for a purpose, and that's why they will do what Jim says, when the time comes. These people are his practice for bigger and better things. If Jim is going to carry out his plan for the future, he needs to figure out which methods work and which are flawed: obviously, he can't rely on a schizophrenic to do the dirty work for him every time.

The first one, after Carl, is a music professor at a college in London. One of Jim's correspondents, a young lady from Soho, complained about him to Jim: she says he frequently made sexual advances toward her after class, once touching her intimately, and she knows he's coerced several other students into having sex with him. Jim won't stand for that, and he tells her so. The girl is scared, and she doesn't know what to do, so Jim helps her. It's the best way to go about things. She gives him her address, and, free of charge, he sends her the materials and instructions. A special service, since she's his friend.

There's a story in the paper the next week about a college professor who's been found hanged in his office with his pants pulled down around his ankles and, interestingly, his ribcage hacked open. It is determined that the cause of death was not hanging, but loss of blood. There is no blood in the office except a tiny puddle just beneath the professor's feet, so this is off. There is an awful lot of coverage in the newspaper and on the television. The police, however, cannot figure it out, and after a few days of media attention the story is moved to the back pages of the news and then disappears. Jim feels rather proud of himself, and the girl he helped is thrilled with the results. The evidence is gone; she has, she tells Jim, disposed of it in just the way he instructed. The body bag wrapped in the cello case is floating at the bottom of the Thames. The instruments have been sterilized and replaced in the university laboratory. The man who did the dissection, a medical student from Scotland, also contacts Jim and thanks him for the plane ticket to Egypt, which Jim had paid for out of his stepmother's bank account (this was taking a risk, but Jim did like risks once in a while). Everything works out, and this is the most fun that Jim has ever had. It's the real world he's controlling out there, playing the way some kids play video games with little pink pixilated monsters. Jim realizes, slowly, that he must be unique, that he must be incredibly smart. None of the other children his age can even play chess competently, and here he is controlling people, real grown-up people, like they're little dolls. Then Jim realizes that it's not that he is especially smart. It is that he is motivated. It is that all of the other people are simply too dull to do anything by themselves but everyday things, like watching the television or eating or sleeping. Jim is the catalyst, he decides. He is going to make the world fun again.

And then, of course, something had to go wrong. It was several months later, near Boxing Day, after two more of Jim's friends had gotten his help with their problems. The story showed up in the news again. Clues Found Indicate Conspiracy Caused Professor's June Death.

Jim throws a tantrum in his room. He throws things. His stepmother shouts at him. He e-mails the girl he helped with the news but she does not reply, so he sends a virus to her e-mail address that will delete all of the information on her computer, should anyone open her mailbox. He wishes he could do more. He doubts that his computer will be located based on the information, but if the police discover his website and his other correspondents, he will have to shut it down, at least for a while.

And then. Jim's tenth birthday, a birthday he will remember forever. His stepmother comes home from her job with her boyfriend, and an ice-cream cake for Jim, and the television's switched on the news. They are reporting on Jim's case, the professor case, and they have figured it out. The girl Jim helped is there, in the foreground, not speaking to the cameras. Jim had never seen her face before. There is no mention of e-mails, but the reporter says that the police suspect a second person was involved in the murder. There is suspicion that the crime was motivated by revenge, as the girl has stated that the professor molested her. It is all very shocking, Jim's stepmother says. She is back on her medication now; Jim switched her back after Carl's death. Jim eats his cake and watches the boyfriend talk about economics. Jim can tell that his stepmother's boyfriend is cheating on his stepmother by his hair and his pant leg and the perfume that hangs around his coat. That is not the point, though. The point is this: as the camera pans out and the reporter is shown standing in front of the courthouse, reporting, there's someone in the background that catches Jim's eye. Two detectives-Jim can tell by their stance and their distance from the defendant that they are detectives-are speaking to one another in hushed tones and glancing furtively around as questions fly from the sea of journalists and television reporters. There is a person next to them, a small person, a child of eleven or twelve. The image is poor-quality, and Jim can't even tell if the kid is a boy or a girl, but Jim sees that the child is speaking to the detectives, right there in front of all the television reporters. Calmly and matter-of-factly, the child is giving the detective inspectors instructions on what to say, and the men are relaying it to the reporters. Jim can see them glancing back at the child for approval. The detectives are listening. Nobody seems to notice or to think this is odd. Perhaps it is assumed that the child is the offspring of one of the detectives and simply demanding sweets or something? Jim can never tell what keeps normal people so unobservant. But, as Jim watches the kid disappear back into the courthouse, Jim is pleased. It wasn't the police that solved his case. He has found his equal.


	3. Chapter 3

That October, when he is ten and three-quarters of a year, Jim's stepmother marries her Irish boyfriend, Ethan McNeal, and all three of them pack up to move to Newhaven, which is further from London than the Powers had lived before. It is quite close to France if you take a ferry, and Jim's stepmother and her new husband are talking all the time about getting a summer home in France. Jim has studied French in case they should go there. He imagines he could do a lot of fun things in France, should they end up staying for a bit; even a day-trip to Paris could yield a number of new contacts that Jim could use. Jim doesn't have an empire, yet, but he does have a contacts list that is expanding at a good clip. Among them are some people from what is known to the layperson as "the underworld". This term conjures up dark sewers filled with thieves and murderers and blueprints of banks, but really it seems to Jim that "the underworld" is a loose term which encompasses everything from petty marijuana peddlers to gang bosses in their dilapidated offices and backstreet brothels. It isn't organized at all. This annoys Jim, for he likes order and patterns. He is excited by breaks in the pattern, and loves to learn their cause, but order is crucial if Jim ever wants anything to get done. He decides very early on that he will have to create some sort of system, so that there can be more overlap and exchange of ideas within the criminal world. Independent operators never get anything significant accomplished on their own, after all. You need to globalize.

In Grays School, Jim is bored. Not simply because of the classes, which are terrifically easy, but also because of the people. They are all incredibly easy to trick, to double-and triple-cross and run circles around. Jim acts gloriously polite around his elders and terrifically nervous and sweet around his peers. He helps a girl with her math homework, and he mutters to himself as if it's puzzling him, before getting the right answer and showing the girl, whose name is Beth, how he did it. Beth is very grateful, but Jim is modest and awkwardly humble, and she likes him immensely. Later that week, Jim is in gym class when some boys begin to jeer. It takes only moments before Jim identifies them and remembers their names, catalogues all the names they call him. _Sissy, Pansy, Pouf. _Not threatening, just making fun of him. Jim is genuinely bad at games in gym: he can't move fast enough to catch the ball or take the flag. He classifies each of the boys in turn. There is Scott, who is smiling too wide and shifting from foot to foot, and who always gives the wrong answer in class; there is Peter, who pulls girls' hair even though he is eleven and should have grown out of it by now; there is Evan, who is hated because he always says weird things and talks about video games and sports in detail when nobody wants to listen to him. Jim looks at them all and turns away, and when Peter pushes him over after taking his flag, Jim doesn't tell the teacher. He just giggles nervously and brushes himself off, and walks over to Beth, making sure that his steps are precise, small, and girlish, and that his wrists hang limp.

Peter is suspended for an indefinite period the following week for taking a knife to school and flashing it about at lunch break. Where he got it and what he was planning on doing with it are facts not forthcoming, and the staff do not find out when they ask Peter. Jim knows. Peter was out to get the little pouf who dared fancy him, as best he could. The information had circulated around the fifth form quickly, once Jim had confided in Beth. Everyone knows this is why Peter was suspended, and so Jim looks guilty and worried for several weeks, until Christmas. Then he tells Beth, in the strictest confidence, that Peter told him that he fancied an older boy in sixth form, but that he was scared that people would find out. Beth is very good, Jim knows, at keeping secrets badly.

Peter's school life becomes a torment in the early months of 1991. He is teased and picked on daily, especially by the sixth form pupils, and he never calls Jim a name again. This isn't really enough for Jim—he would like to see Peter dead—but this sort of killing, close by, is impractical and Jim senses that it would only attract attention. Besides, that might be construed as overly defensive and emotional. Jim doesn't kill for hatred. He kills to get things out of his way, like you'd run over a rabbit to get a bus of sick people to a hospital, or like you'd kill native populations in order to expand colonisation. Peter isn't in Jim's way at all.

Jim likes summer break. Beth doesn't have an email, and she rarely calls Jim. She's made more friends of her own sex, now, and so she doesn't bother Jim, unless she wants to gossip. This is a good thing, because she was, eventually, a bit annoying.

Jim's summer project is getting rid of his stepmother and stepfather. He could do this easily, with a carefully placed cigarette in their bed (thanks to his stepfather's smoking, these are easy to find) or a malfunctioning gas tank. Jim wants it to be special, though, this project. Besides, if his step-parents die in an accident, it's likely that Jim will be shunted off to the nearest relative, once again in the company of a faux family who will always remain connected with his past. Jim hates that idea.

Jim's plan is careful. At first, he wasn't going to make a big production of it, because he hates getting his hands dirty, but he decides that his stepmother is worth it. He wants a mirror image of Carl's death, with the pills, and so this is what he does: Jim goes to each nearby supermarket in Newhaven every day for the month of June and he buys two packages of Sudafed from all of them. Sudafed purchased by an eleven-year old isn't too suspicious, or if it is, the kid isn't the suspect.

Jim makes some friends with his project, once it's gotten started, but it is the getting started that's difficult. He sets it all up in the backyard shed, which is filled with spiders and grubs and things neither of his new parents want to touch. Jim thinks it's silly not to know a piece of your own property, but after watching them since they moved in, he knows that they won't ever use the shed, and it has no windows, so they never look in, and it's far enough from the house and the garden, so they never go too near. He looks up all the things you have to do online, and though it's hard, he gets his hands on all of the equipment and chemicals necessary. His step-parents don't even ask where he is. It is really too easy. Simple chemistry, simple plan.

Jim can only make small batches, since it's a small shed. He puts up some notices with the phone number around the neighborhood, in terms only someone who knew what was being talked about could understand. Jim sells a few bags of the stuff he's made to teenagers, behaving as if he doesn't know what's going on, telling them his mother sent him. The word spreads. It isn't long before someone breaks the fence in the night trying to get in. Someone stupid, Jim thinks, who probably doesn't even know how the drug is made, but they set off the porch-light and scare his stepfather, and act as a precursor, a warning of things to come. If Jim were his stepfather, he'd check the back shed to see if the intruder had messed things up or hidden something there, but Ethan McNeal is not that sort of man. He pretends instead that nothing has happened after a few days go by. This is unwise.

It's September again when the police catch word of the lab from a teenage girl who has Jim's little pamphlet with the phone number in her back pocket. Jim is over at Beth's house when the police storm the place, and Jim's eyes go big when he hears about what's happening the next morning, when the police come over to Beth's house. He starts to cry. Beth is worried, and she is more scared than Jim looks. The police explain that nothing is Jim's fault, and Jim swallows his sobs and lifts his dark child's eyes and nods and goes with them, snuffling, to the police department, and he thinks, oh, oh you stupid men.

He tells the police department exactly what happened, the whole truth, all of it, how his stepmother has been making meth for a few years, how they moved to Newhaven because she was almost caught at it in their old town. How they've been getting Jim—poor Jim, the policewoman's eyes says—to go and traffick for them. It is a story to break anybody's heart. It's a pretty major operation for such a small shed, and worth a hefty prison sentence. Jim watches from behind the policewoman in court as his stepmother denies it all, becoming more and more hysterical, and watches his stepfather start to doubt his wife. It all happens rather well, in the end. The lie is so much easier to believe than the truth. Supermarket employees tell the attorneys that they've seen Jim buying Sudafed for months, the poor boy made to fetch things for his wicked stepmother's drug lab. The stepmother denies everything, and her statements seem to imply that she's delusional: she seems to be insinuating that Jim, the eleven-year-old, had set up the lab himself. It's a story for the newspapers, but like all stories, it isn't reported for long. Jim is quietly removed from Newhaven and put into foster care. And of course this is just how it was always going to happen.

Jim Powers disappears for good. Jim Moriarty is a little boy in London, starting sixth form at a school in the suburbs. He has adoring foster parents, and he shows them every affection. He is in counseling for a while, but by eighth form that's ended; he's perfectly mentally stable, well-rounded, and a happy young man as could be, considering the circumstances. It is hinted that he has a high-functioning form of autism, but that's all. He's all right, by any measure, and only getting better.


	4. Chapter 4

Jim is thirteen when he finds Sherlock Holmes. He hasn't been idle during the years since his move to London. He's established a connection with a Chinese smuggling gang, designed thirty-four classy custom-made murders, and he has also engineered countless kidnappings. He has a bank account which his foster parents know about, which is fed a little money each month by another, much fuller bank account in Switzerland which doesn't officially belong to Jim. He tells his foster parents that he has a job at a bookstore, sorting things in the back room. His foster parents think he's at this job, the afternoon he first sees Sherlock.

He found Sherlock Holmes through an online forum, in the place he would have least expected it. Jim was annoyed that he hadn't found his rival earlier; after all, he was the cleverer one, he was the one who had outwitted Holmes with the Carl Powers case. Jim should have tracked down the young detective months back, but it had seemed from the beginning like a lost cause. Scotland Yard had, of course, no record of any detectives being advised by a child, and there was little to no way of identifying the person Jim had seen for a few seconds in the background of one fuzzy news broadcast. It was purely by chance that he came across this specific thread on a London-based social networking site. Jim was trolling about, as usual, on the threads connected to current events and specifically crime, giving one or another of his numerous email addresses to people he felt sure would need it. None of the people on these sites were ever very smart, but something about one post, a post that had triggered a long chain of replies, caught his eye. The author was identified only by their initials, SH. They were replying to a post on the recent trial for the murder of a two-year-old boy, James Patrick Bulger. From the evidence, it seemed that the murder had been committed by two ten-year-old boys. Previous commenters had simply mentioned the appalling nature of the crime, expressing their revulsion with anyone who would kill a two-year-old. Several had doubted the ability of a ten-year-old to do anything so vicious. SH had posted a lengthy response meant to address the initiator of the thread, who had said, in their post, '…kids should not be able to do this. I don't think that these boys killed him, that's too ridiculous and terrible.'

SH's post read:

You are wrong. Children are capable of anything adults are capable of. They are capable of cruelty and, as has been proven in trenches and farms and in first-world cities, of murder. All of the evidence in this case indicates that the boys tortured and murdered James Bulger: the paint on the shoes and clothes, the blood, the security feeds. It is unsurprising that these two young people should have killed a child, as adults kill children every day. Children are simply people without experience, who have no regard yet for the societal ideals which frequently prevent adults from engaging in taboo activities. Why is it that people regard children as somehow incapable of violence or cruelty? Anyone with ideas on this please re: . I am uninterested in hearing your ideas on the morality of my views.

Despite the last sentence, many people had replied to SH with specific judgments on the morality they felt SH lacked. They pleaded with SH to recognize that this murder had been an abomination, a rarity, a tragic accident. Jim smirked when he saw that SH had posted nothing else on the thread after the torrent of criticism. He clicked on SH's profile, and that was where he found the photograph. Jim frowned on people who put their photographs online where anyone could see them, but something about this photo was different. The boy, a young teenager from what Jim could discern in the picture, was staring at the camera expectantly, intently. The photo had been taken against a blank white wall, and from the angle the camera had been positioned about twelve feet away. The quality was poor, and Jim realized that the original picture had been a Polaroid. Something else was odd, though, apart from the fact that this young boy had got hold of a computer connected to the Internet. Jim recognized the likeness of the child on the news at the same moment he noticed the edges of the binding under the white shirt.

Now Jim is standing on a corner by the apartment building where the Holmes family live. He has placed a bomb in the mailbox across the street. He did it himself, this morning. The bomb is scheduled to go off in ten minutes. He looks at his watch, and then makes polite conversation with the woman walking her dog. Jim is not autistic. He knows how to relate to everyone just as he wants to. He is nothing if not a brilliant actor.

"It's a lovely day today, isn't it?" Jim asks, grinning. "This late in the year, you wouldn't expect nice weather like this. And the leaves still on the street trees, gives this whole area a lovely look. That's a great dog you have there." The dog in question is red, with long, floppy hair.

"Oh, thank you," the woman says. "He's very precious, my Albert. We got him when he was three or four. He was rescued from a puppy mill."

"Oh, wow," Jim smiles, showing teeth. "That's so amazing. So many people buy dogs without regard to the habits of the breeders. It's a shame. What breed is he?"

After two minutes, the woman smiles at him in a friendly way and excuses herself, continuing her walk.

Eight minutes to go, and this is when Jim sees the car pull up. The license plate number is the same as one that a Mr. Holmes secured four years ago for his newly purchased Fiat Bravo 4-door hatchback. Jim knows this because a lot of people, even people in the government, are very easy to bribe. Out of the car comes a middle-aged woman with light hair. After a moment the passenger door opens and Sherlock Holmes gets out. Jim smiles, very sincerely, when he sees Sherlock. Jim doesn't know his name right now, of course. The other boy is dressed as a girl right now, his short hair hidden under a cap, his legs exposed by a plaid skirt like those worn in public schools. His gaze is sharp and analytical, and his head swivels as he gets out of the car, taking in the street. His eyes catch for a brief moment on Jim, who winks and smiles in a flirtatious way. Sherlock's face goes blank and cold and he turns to the middle-aged woman and says a few short words. The woman shrugs it off and walks up to the apartment building door. They go inside. Five minutes later, the bomb goes off. Jim is not there to watch it, but he sees the smoke from a few blocks away. He hears later that there were no fatalities, and he is disappointed, because this means that the story is gone from the papers after a day, and there is no further word of the investigation in the press. Jim wonders, in years to come, if Sherlock made the connection between the winking boy on the corner and the bomb, delivered by mail to his neighbor. Jim wonders if Sherlock was even interested in a case where nobody had died.

The internet isn't really all that, in 1993. Mosaic, the graphic browser, has just been invented. Most people have never been on the net, and few kids own a computer that's connected to the world wide Web. Jim still manages to find the email address of a girl who goes to Sherlock's school. The school is just for girls, and Jim discovers that it has fewer than eight hundred students, only two hundred per class. The girl he meets online doesn't know Sherlock personally, but she's seen him. She is actually the one who brings him up first, after Jim asks if there is anyone odd at her school. She calls him Sheryl Holmes, like the birth certificate Jim found did, and says she's very smart, and says she must be a lesbian. Jim asks why she thinks so. This is over chat. The girl tells Jim that Sheryl's hair is very short, and her voice is very deep, almost like she is consciously lowering it. Jim asks if Sheryl shows romantic interest in girls, and the girl says she doesn't like anyone. Jim agrees that gay kids don't make friends as easily because of their differences. He flirts with the girl, and plays the sensitive, intelligent boy, and meanwhile he decides that Sherlock (he still doesn't know his name, though, so Jim thinks Sheryl, here) must have different values than he does, or just isn't a very good actor. He still wants to meet him, though, because Sherlock is the first person that Jim has seen who really understands, really gets what Jim gets from the world.

He'll always want to meet him.


	5. Chapter 5

Jim's foster parents begin to ask questions when Jim finishes his last year of middle school without mentioning a girlfriend. They are very supportive, if a little nervous to bring up the subject of sexual orientation. They let Jim know that whatever he does, they will still love him, which, Jim thinks, is a little creepy, seeing as they only formally adopted him a year and a half ago. Anyone who can love so easily shouldn't be allowed to have children at all. Jim tells his foster parents that he just hasn't found anyone he likes yet, boy or girl. He is shy about the subject of sex, and lowers his eyes to the ground before glancing up a little apologetically. It's heartwarming, really. He's growing about a quarter-inch per month now, stretching into a gangly adolescent with dark fuzz on his upper lip. He's still quite short, but he is less easy to overlook, if you're walking on the street. He carries himself too well for a teenager, with a straight back and precise steps. More people are remembering him, which Jim dislikes. In the months after his fourteenth birthday, he begins to slouch.

Jim keeps an eye on the world for interesting goings-on, especially nearby. One of his informants alerts him that there's a high death rate in a small personal surgery in Hyde, and that a large number of bodies are cremated rather than being given a proper funeral ceremony. Upon looking into it, Jim discovers that several old women have left their doctor large sums of money, which didn't make much sense until you noticed that the same doctor had been caught back in 1975 for forging over twenty prescriptions for diamorphine. Jim wonders how many years it will be before anyone else notices old Harold Shipman and his neat little money factory. In the meantime, he contacts Harold, threatens him, and then asks nicely for a cut of the profits.

The investigation into the Penny Bell case of 1991 continues quietly, outside of the press, and Jim is only to catch scraps of information from his source in Scotland Yard. The police, it is said, are making little headway. Nobody can figure out who killed the businesswoman, and for what purpose. Nobody knows who she was going to see when she left the house, or why she mentioned an appointment that she hadn't marked in her weekly planner. Nobody can figure out why anyone would stab a nice lady like Bell fifty times. Jim knows, of course, but he isn't telling. His source in Scotland Yard tells Jim that there's this kid that keeps trying to get into the station, who tells people that she's trying to speak with a certain detective inspector who doesn't work there any more, in order to talk about the Bell case. Jim is interested in this little sound bite, but even under the threat of no payment, his informant won't tell him anything else about the crazy girl.

A month and a bit later Jim asks about the girl again, and his informant looks a little frightened. Even from across the park, in the telephone booth that he's calling the policeman from, Jim can see the officer's eyes widen.

"You didn't have anything to do with it, did you?"

This makes Jim frown. He hates it when he doesn't know about things. "Have anything to do with what, exactly?"

"Her disappearance. Sheryl Holmes. Sixteen. She's gone missing, about a week ago. Her family has got fliers up at the station down here. They've been calling practically every day for news."

Jim absorbs this information slowly, like a snake digesting a mouse. "Sorry, I don't know about any Sheryl," he says, after a moment of uneasy silence in which he can hear buses behind him on the roundabout, people passing by talking to each other in a myriad of accents. Jim is worried, but he is not about to show it. "I'll let you know if any of my people have got anything to do with it."

"It's a missing girl. She might be dead, for all we know. She's just a teenager, she can't take care of herself. Please, Jim, let me know if you find anything out. A girl's life is at stake."

Jim's lungs seem to have shrunken. His breaths are shallow, and his eyes are fierce and weasel-like as they glare across the park to the officer. "Pardon, me, officer," he says as sweetly and boyishly as he can, "But what you think is more often than not entirely invalid. I don't believe you have any fucking clue what you're talking about with this one. Your paycheck will be sent in a few days. Ta." He hangs up, and then holds the phone to his ear, pretending to talk to his grandmother, until the police officer leaves the park.

Jim can't find Sherlock Holmes anywhere, under any name. He has completely disappeared. The private school's registry, which previously had a file on him, ceases to list him as a student or even to mention him. Sherlock's brother is now away at college, and Mr. Holmes Sr. and his wife have moved out of London. Their address is now occupied by a young Russian family.

SH's account is still up, but he only posts brief, cryptic messages every few weeks. Eventually, the photo is removed from his profile.

Jim is aware that he knows very little about Sherlock Holmes. He figures that the boy planned this disappearance. Jim admits that if this is the case, the plan has its benefits. On the streets, Sherlock will not have to dress as Sheryl. He won't have to bore himself to death with school or teenage life. He'll have access to street hormones as well as the near-infinite network of eyewitness information on crimes that exists among the homeless youth of London. If he remains in hiding until after his eighteenth birthday, he could emerge with an entirely new identity. It's a smart plan, as long as he can stay alive that long. Jim admires Sherlock's daring, but he rather hopes that Sherlock is as smart as Jim thinks he is. It takes a lot of brains to survive the underworld of London.

It's several months before Jim hears of Sherlock again. An arson case in Kingston-on-Thames is traced to its perpetrator, a good friend of Jim's. An anonymous tip-off led the police to the arsonist. Jim learns from his informant that it was a young homeless man who gave the information to the police. A weird-looking guy, the secretary at the police station said, very thin, with dark hair and, uh, sort of a girly look, I guess, not like gay but… you know, just one of those. Jim knows exactly what she means. He asks the secretary, before she hangs up, whether the homeless kid had any stubble.

"On his face, you know-or sideburns? Any kind of facial hair?"

The secretary seemed confused, but then decided that Jim must be looking for identifying characteristics. "No facial hair," she said, "but he seemed pretty young, maybe sixteen or so. He was all banged up, bruises all over his…uh, his right eye. He's pale, and has high cheekbones. He's got a black backpack, and he has that sort of American baggy-clothes thing going on. He was wearing all-black clothing when I saw him."

Jim is very pleased. "Did he leave a name?" he asks her, and this is when he learns the name, the real name. Before then he thought of the detective as SH or Sheryl Holmes, in his head.

"Sherlock."

Jim smiles, and without saying goodbye, he hangs up.

Sherlock doesn't always leave the same name with police, possibly because he doesn't want a reputation, but more likely because he doesn't want to be connected with the missing girl from an upper-class family who disappeared without a trace over half a year ago. Jim learns to look for the name Sherry Vernet along with Sigerson and the amusing, baffling alias Captain Basil. Under these aliases, and through the use of letters, e-mails and anonymous phone calls, Sherlock leaves tip-offs with the police, sometimes drawing detailed diagrams to explain why his conclusion is correct. Jim manages to get his hands on one after blackmailing the detective inspector in residence at that particular police station. The report on the embezzlement case was done in a haphazard, non-uniform style, but it contained all the facts that were necessary. By the end of the report, Sherlock had pinpointed one retired Mr. Trevor, aka former bank president James Armitage, as the culprit. The crime was simple and boring, done for a personal motive and without excessive bloodshed (ignoring the mysterious deaths of two of Armitage's co-workers), but Jim revels in Sherlock's deduction and precise logic. A boy like this could find Jim, someday, Jim thinks, and could destroy everything that he's built. It wouldn't take long, if Sherlock started looking, started making the right connections and noticing the patterns.

After Jim reads the report through, he looks over the physical manuscript just as carefully. It is, after all, a sort of contact with Sherlock Holmes. He finds fingerprints on the paper, and notices trace amounts of ash in the manila envelope that indicate cigarette use. Each detail is stored in Jim's mind like a fly in amber.

At Jim's secondary school in London, boys still make fun of him. They call him 'faggot' more and more, and Jim does nothing but smile. Peter, his old bully from Newhaven, committed suicide in early spring of this year, and his death was reported in the news. There isn't any pleasure, Jim discovered then, in making someone die simply for the purpose of revenge. Now Jim jovially bears all of the attacks with a nervous smirk and a mumbled protest. It's fun to watch the teachers worry about him, watch them fret when their star pupil is called names and pushed around. The best part, of course, is when one of them gets him alone. It's really the only time Jim gets to practice his dramatic range: between the crying, the wild protestations, and the confessions of affection intended to enervate his persecution, he feels he deserves an American Oscar at least. Playing gay, Jim thinks.

Jim doesn't like the idea of romance in the modern sense. He has no fantasies of co-dependent relationships or chaste kisses or sweet nicknames, unless perhaps they're ironic. When he lies in bed at night, after he's finished e-mailing serial killers and making clandestine phone calls to mob bosses, he doesn't think of love. As he touches himself he thinks of art, thinks of puzzles and stories and riddles: murder, war and crime for the sake of relieving boredom; blood spilled in the name of entertainment; a man who was once a girl; a detective who sleeps in the dark abandoned buildings with crack-heads; a hatred and rivalry mingled irreversibly, sweetly, with desire.


	6. Chapter 6

It's the long nights that Jim likes best. Wintertime nights where the stars are covered by clouds and pollution, when the lights of London are the only stars that anyone can see. The universe becomes small, and so the looming city, with all its stones and pipes and years of seeing too many people, seems that much more immense. The alleyways are dark and unguarded, opening into the streets like a hundred thousand cold mouths filled with trash and vermin and the stench of history and gasoline. Jim goes on walks in the dark. The Moriartys don't know how quietly it is possible to descend a fire escape.

Jim hates the idea that anyone could think his life sterile. He is a part of the big smouldering greedy underworld, with all its fluids and odors and guilt and scars. The danger is his bitter, hot, coffee which wakes him from vacancy and dreams. So he walks, in the dark, and talks to people, and memorizes the streets until he knows all of his neighborhood and the surrounding area as well as any cabbie. He tries his hand at small petty break-ins, a few times, always being careful to choose places without security cameras, always being careful to leave no traces. He wears gloves and uses the back door, and keeps none of what he takes. Jim always gets home by dawn.

Jim is sixteen. He isn't a child anymore, no longer such an astounding prodigy. He is disappointed in himself for not expanding his reach further while he had the element of surprise. It's only a few more years before he could legally be tried as an adult, and before people start giving him funny looks. He is odd, and an odd adult is watched more cautiously than an odd little boy. His double life grows more and more contrasting. The bosses in their seedy dens now offer him alcohol, and though Jim never drinks what they give him (a thousand ways to poison someone, more than a hundred ways with no odor, no taste) he feels that they look at him more appraisingly, sizing him up, wondering if they could take him. He witnesses his first murders in person, that year, men shot right in front of him. If you'd asked him, and if he were being truthful, he would have told you that he expected more. Humans die so easily, with no more fanfare than a squashed worm oozing liquid and organs onto a wet sidewalk. The eyes roll and they foam at the mouth and make noise. Sometimes some blood comes out, but that's really all. It really is unnerving, the gangsters and cartel bosses think, as they watch Jim's face when someone dies, that he never has the slightest sign of emotion, not even joy. He watches like a person looking at the telly, about to change the channel.

His adopted parents have managed to have a child of their own, and the small baby, as it grows into a dull little child, reminds Jim far too much of Carl. He wants to leave for university as quickly as he can, and so he does.

His adopted mother is hit by a car. His adopted father disappears soon after, and suicide is suspected by the neighbors. An investigation is instructed to look into , but it's closed down and eventually erased from the databases and removed from the material records. The baby is placed in foster care, but if you try to find out where it ended up, in which house, with which family, it's impossible to say. Jim is free.

It's a late night in early January of 1996 when Jim is sitting in his swank hotel suite, funded by the Swiss account he's never gotten to use so much before now. He's had tea sent up, but he finished the whole pot long ago and can't be bothered to make more hot water. The bag sits in the bottom of his cup like a dead thing. His legs are resting in front of him, on the antique wooden table. The hotel is an old one, and there aren't many windows in his suite. Most people like windows, but after seeing snipers at work, Jim has come to realize that they are a liability. He's increasingly aware that, while there isn't a police-sanctioned price on his head just yet, lots of people all over the world would like to kill Jim Moriarty. Which is why Moriarty has invited Mr. Sebastian Moran to join him at his suite.

Moran isn't like Jim. He is tough and practical and he kills for vengeance rather than because of boredom, taking a gross pleasure in death that nauseates Jim and also excites him. He is a colonel, or he was before he was investigated for the unjustified death of nearly twenty civilians, back in 1992. Moran is twenty-seven, and was a prodigy in his own way, once. Nobody's heard about the trial-Moran's family, whose name isn't really Moran, is as old as the English law and rich enough to keep everyone involved silent-but Moran has been obliged to return quietly to London. He's been working as a killer-for-hire ever since. Jim wants him to be his bodyguard. So far the negotiations are going well, and Moran seems well to Jim's liking, more than he had expected from a military man.

It's when Sebastian has pocketed the advance that Jim gave him that he grabs Jim around the neck with an elbow and holds the gun to Jim's head. Jim smiles and chuckles under his breath in a way that does not seem to convey the idea of a sixteen-year-old boy at all.

"Have you ever had to clean up a body, Moran?" Jim asks, turning his head and waggling his dark eyebrows. "From what I understand, you've never shot at close range before. Always using rifles. There's more blood than you'd expect. It gets everywhere, under your nails and all over your clothes. I sure hope you brought some of you own with you to change into once you've killed me."

Moran hisses and holds Jim's neck in such a way that Jim finds it difficult to breathe. He coughs.

"I'm not stupid, though," Jim whispers, in a low, strangled voice, with the little air he has left. He is exhilarated at the pain that accompanies the elbow in his throat, but he's becoming aware that he has little time before he passes out. "I've notified many in my network about this meeting, and I have a correspondent with the police that'll track you down in an instant if I am murdered." Jim is bullshitting-his police associate is all but useless-but Moran's grip slackens for an instant, and that's all Jim needs. He drives the penknife that was up his sleeve into Moran's leg. Moran gasps, grits his teeth in pain, and leans heavily on Jim, allowing Jim to loosen the grip around his neck and push the other man onto the floor, grabbing the gun. Jim's never used firearms, but he knows from books how they work. This one appears to have been modified-some sort of muffler to disguise the sound. Jim spins round to Moran again, who is stumbling to his feet, and experimentally fires a bullet into the wall by his head. The gun snaps back with the discharge, startling Jim and jarring his wrist, but it only takes a moment for him to regain control and point the gun with both hands at Moran.

"Who's paying you?"

Moran lurches forward with all the determination of a veteran soldier. Jim tightens his finger on the trigger, but instead of firing he uses his left hand to fumble out the other hidden knife, the last one, and jam it into Moran's shoulder. He knows where the veins are in a human being, and from the positioning he's fairly sure he's severed at least a couple. Moran is bleeding profusely, and he falls to the floor, breathing hard.

Jim kicks the other man over and puts a knee into the back of his neck. "You were hired by a third party, weren't you? There's no benefit to killing me if you weren't."

Sebastian Moran wheezes, and names an American crime family. Jim scoffs.

"Even if you're telling the truth, they're broke. They couldn't possibly pay you even as much as the advance I just gave you. Who is it. I can hurt you more if I need to. Plenty of knives and poisons all over this wretched suite."

Moran whispers the name of one of the richest men in the world. This man isn't on any of the Ten Richest Men list, and very few people have ever heard his name attached to anything meaningful. Jim recognizes it, and gets up, moving the gun away from the assassin's head. Moran is nearly unconscious, so Jim calls someone to come and fix him up. He turns back to the wounded man just as his eyes begin to roll back into his head.

"Mr. Moran, let it be understood that you work for me now."


End file.
